Patriots, Villains, and Franjo Tuđman*

UDK 32-05 Tuđman, F. Patriots, Villains, and Franjo TUđman* James J. SADKOVICH** Patriots and Nationalists Asked in April 1993 what he thought of a poll by Globus which conclud- ed that it would be “difficult” to list him “among Croatia’s patriots,” Franjo Tuđman replied that he considered himself a patriot (rodoljub). “Patriotism,” he said, “I hold as a worthy phenomenon in life, in the feelings of peoples and nations. It is another thing,” he added, “when it turns into chauvinism, impe- rialism.” But in Croatia, he continued, the chauvinistic parties had obtained fewer votes than elsewhere in Europe. He believed this had occurred because under his leadership the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica – HDZ) had projected a positive image, attracting voters across the ideological spectrum.1 But the Croatian President refused to concede the man- tel of patriot to his more vociferous opponents. Some, like Zvonimir Čičak, a student leader during the 1970s and a human rights activist in the 1990s, Tuđman dismissed as unable to accept the idea of a sovereign Croatia. Others, he explained, opposed the new democratic order and criticized his govern- ment because they could not accept anyone in power but themselves.2 Nor, many of his critics might counter, could Tuđman.3 His image of himself was clearly not consonant with the image others held of him. Seeing past the image of any political leader is difficult; in Tuđman’s case, it is doubly so because he was branded as a radical nationalist by the Yugoslav regime, and he was consistently portrayed as a dangerous nationalist when he emerged twenty years later as the leader of the HDZ.4 Most people in public *I would like to thank the Woodrow Wilson Center and IREX for their support of my research on Franjo Tuđman, as well as Sabrina Ramet, the Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelije univer- siteit (NTNU), and those who have commented on this paper. **James J. Sadkovich, Ph. D., Leiden, Netherlands 1 Franjo Tuđman, Hrvatska riječ svijetu: Razgovori sa stranim predstavnicima (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada/Hrvatski institut za povijest, 1999), p. 249. 2 Tuđman, Hrvatska riječ, p. 254–5. Čičak had just accused Croatia of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 3 Stjepan Malović and Gary W. Selnow, The People, Press, and Politics of Croatia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), p. 140, quote Marvin Stone, who believes Tuđman “...has instincts that are....uncomfortably close to fascism. He is antidemocratic, powerful, authoritarian and...fascis- tic.” Drago Hedl’s “Living in the Past: Franjo Tudjman’s Croatia,” Current History (March 2000), is a diatribe; Hedl wrote for Feral Tribune, a vociferous critic of Tuđman. 4 For example, Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin/BBC Books, 1996), pp. 83–4, 86. 247 J. J. SADKOVICH, Patriots, Villains, and Franjo Tuđman life strive to present an image of themselves which is as carefully crafted as are the attacks of their critics. This was also the case with Tuđman. He published practically everything he wrote and left thousands of pages of writing, many defensive, some self-serving and disingenuous, few dispassionate, almost all detailed and turgid. He presented a formal figure in public, yet was prone to off-the-cuff remarks that seemed at best reckless. The images he projected, like the photographs in his 1991 biography, confuse rather than clarify.5 His obituaries were almost uniformly unflattering, and his magnum opus was gen- erally ridiculed or condemned in the West.6 Politicians, statesmen, and diplomats cannot be expected to be candid, and journalists are as much stenographers for their sources or dramatists for their editors as they are critics or analysts. Yet Tuđman was extremely candid, and journalists seemed to feel compelled to editorialize every time they wrote about him. Most journalists pick up and disseminate what they hear and read, whether it is propaganda, rumor, or hearsay; they rarely probe the beliefs and histories of the participants to a conflict. But they do like to dramatize.7 This was certainly the case with Tuđman, whether the laudatory reports in the official press or the vicious denunciations in both the opposition and much of the Western media. Both journalists and politicians tended to reduce complex realities to comprehensible patterns based on existing stereotypes.8 When academics and analysts act as members of the media or as partisans for a party or a people, this is true of their work as well. They can be as superficial, unin- formed, and biased as any journalist writing against deadline, and during the 5 Željko Krušelj, Franjo Tuđman. Biografija (Zagreb: Globus, 1991), for Tuđman at official functions, in a cardigan in his library, pruning trees in his garden, smelling a flower, and diving in a skimpy swimming suit. To an American eye, many of the photos are simply odd. 6 The Croatian Embassy’s obituary, www.croatiaemb.org/tudjman/biography.html, is positive, but the obituary at Teoma.com depicts Tuđman as a “ruthless dictator” who “thwarted democracy and suppressed any internal dissent. Miloš Vasić, “Dr. Franjo Tuđman, 1922–1999, www.vreme.com/arhiva_html/467/08.html, portrays Tuđman as an anti-Semite whose obses- sion with Bosnia, his scheming with Milošević, and his efforts to rehabilitate the NDH caused all of Croatia’s problems. The Serbian editor dismisses the Croatian victory in 1995 as the result of Milošević’s decision not to support Croatia’s Serbs. For a particularly bizarre interchange, see the documents collected by Joe Tripician at balkansnet.org/joet-jakov.html. 7 For critiques of the media, see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Norman Isaacs, Untended Gates. The Mismanagement of the Press (Columbia UP, 1986); Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources. A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990); David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media, Power, Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1981); and Lawrence C. Soley, The News Shapers. The Sources Who Explain the News (Westport CT: Praeger, 1992). 8 Janusz Bugajski, in Raju G.C. Thomas and H. Richard Friman, The South Slav Conflict. History, Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 115–116. Some insist that Serbs, not Croats, were demonized, e.g., Anita Lekić, “Words as Weapons: The New York Times on the Yugoslav Civil War,” South East European Monitor (1996) 1(5): 12–22, and Peter Brock, “’Greater Serbia’ vs. the Greater Western Media,” Mediterranean Quarterly (1995) 6 (1). 248 Review of Croatian History 2/2006, no.1, 247 - 280 early 1990s, many savaged Franjo Tuđman, who became the dominant symbol of a dangerous Croatian nationalism.9 Dismissed by academics as a loquacious amateur historian and depicted by the media as a nationalist and neo-fascist, Tuđman’s past as a dissident was forgotten and his respect for formal, procedural democracy ignored. So David Owen recalls Alija Izetbegović and Milovan đilas as dissidents, but he labels Tuđman a nationalist and an “opportunist in the cause of Croatia” who con- ducted “diplomacy by histrionics.”10 For Ian Kearns, he was just another dangerous Balkan politician, a Croatian Milošević. At best, he was an authoritarian leader, not a democrat.11 The Bosnian Croat leader, Mate Boban may have praised the Croatian president for his realism, and Tuđman may have seen himself as a patriot and a democrat, but most foreign observers condemned him for practicing a brutal Realpolitik. Had he not died, Franjo Tuđman would certainly have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as the leader of a “joint criminal enterprise” and taken his place in the docket alongside the former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević. Many believe that is where he belonged, not on the pages of Croatian textbooks as the father of his country. Yet those who knew him would disagree.12 So who was Franjo Tuđman? To begin to answer that question, it is first necessary to dispel the layers of propaganda which obscure Tuđman. As Richard Cobb, a historian of the French Revolution, has noted, in troubled times sorting the false from the true is difficult because the meaning of a word depends on who is using it, and 9 For example, Ian Kearns, “Croatian Politics: The New Authoritarianism,” Political Quarterly (January-March 1996), 67 (1), EBSCO Text, pp. 2, 7, thinks “a confused analysis of the nature” of “the Croatian regime” led to diverse views of Tuđman’s Croatia as a victim of aggression, a fascist state, or the same as Serbia. He sees Croatia evolving “from war victim to warmonger,” with “a new edifice of authoritarian power.” He also tends to credit rumor and gossip and to accept the most negative explanation for an event, e.g., he notes a rumor that the HDZ had “moles” in opposition parties, then comments, without verifying the rumor, that the HDZ was “not relying on such tactics alone.” For criticism of the “complicity of the routinized academic community,” see Ivan Iveković in Stefano Bianchini and R. C. Nation, The Yugoslav Conflict and its Implications for International Relations (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1998), p. 213. 10 David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), pp. 6, 15, 36–8, 75, 78, who cites Rebecca West, Fitzroy Maclean, and Milovan đilas, criticized the Croats for having “attacked” the “Krajina” in 1995, which he believes had been Serb territory for 300 years. 11 Kearns, “Croatian Politics,” EBSCO text, p. 3, notes that Tuđman was popular, but believes that he was “accused rightly of an authoritarian style of leadership” because he intimidated HDZ deputies and appointed “friends and close colleagues” to high office.

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